LG Electronics has reportedly decided to release smartphones with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone 8 operating system this year. The company plans to significantly boost shipments of its mobile phones and smartphones this year and is looking forward to differentiate its offerings by adopting Windows Phone 8 platform, a local report claims.

LG intends to increase sales of cell phones to 75 million units in 2013, up from around 55 million in the previous year. Approximately 45 million units out of the total number will be lucrative smartphones, whereas 30 million will be feature phones, according to the Korea Times news-paper. The company reportedly wants to ship at least 10 million of smartphones every quarter, but will try to keep sales higher than that.

In a bid to maintain its unit market share, LG intends to continue making inexpensive Optimus-branded smartphones powered by Google Android operating system. However, it will attempt to conquer additional revenue share by releasing flagship “phablet” with 5.5” screen with 1920*1080 resolution this February and by adopting Windows Phone 8 platform for mainstream devices.

“We will release quite a number of new Optimus devices this year and LG also has some new smartphones in the works, that will run Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8,” a senior executive from one of LG’s local partners told the Korea Times.

Considering the fact that the market of smartphones with Microsoft Windows Phone 8 is not as crowded as the market of smartphones with Google Android, it makes quite a lot of sense for LG to try the new mobile platform from the software giant. Keeping in mind that Microsoft has rather strict requirements for smartphones running its latest mobile OS, there will be no low-end smartphones with low profit margins featuring the platform for quite a while.

It is noteworthy that with Windows Phone 8 Microsoft finally manages to get support from smartphone makers. The first wave of devices for Windows Phone 8 arrived late in 2012 from Nokia, Huawei, Samsung and HTC, all built on Snapdragon S4 chips from Qualcomm. Since then, Lenovo Group, ZTE and LG Electronics have either publicly or unofficially showed interest in the WP8.